Can you see me now? Audience and disclosure regulation in online social network sites

The prevailing paradigm in Internet privacy litera-ture, treating privacy within a context merely of rights and violations, is inadequate for studying the Internet as a social realm. Following Goffman on self-presentation and Altman’s theorizing of privacy as an optimization between competing pressures for disclosure and with-drawal, the author investigates the mechanisms used by a sample (n = 704) of college students, the vast majority users of Facebook and Myspace, to negotiate boundaries between public and private. Findings show little to no relationship between online privacy concerns and infor-mation disclosure on online social network sites. Students manage unwanted audience concerns by adjusting pro-file visibility and using nicknames but not by restricting the information within the profile. Mechanisms analo-gous to boundary regulation in physical space, such as walls, locks, and doors, are favored; little adaptation is made to the Internet’s key features of persistence, searchability, and cross-indexability. The author also finds significant racial and gender differences